Category: Books
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Weekly Wanderings: May 10, 2026
A few short updates to start: In late March, I wrote about the PWHL game I attended in Detroit and how enthusiastic the crowd was for the city to get its own women’s hockey team. That enthusiasm has now officially paid off, as the PWHL announced on Wednesday that a Detroit team will start playing…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 4, 2026
Back to the Archives Because my job is largely office-based and administrative, I don’t often have the opportunity to stretch the archival research muscles I trained in graduate school. But I’ve long had the idea of digging into the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) historical archives, which are held at the Bentley Historical Library—just a…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 1, 2026
Does anyone else feel like the first two months of 2026 have included enough activity and events for a whole year? I suspect I’m not the only one who has already maxed out. Let’s keep the chaos and upheaval to a minimum in March, hmmm? Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews This…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 16, 2026
I love to write book reviews. I find it incredibly enjoyable when I’m reading a book and feel something spark—an interesting bit of history, or a new perspective, or a wonderful turn of phrase—that makes me impatient to tell everyone else about what I’m reading. I get excited about a book and I want other…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 8, 2026
I have a new review at The Wall Street Journal, discussing a wonderful and very engaging book by journalist Yi-Ling Liu, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. I’ve written a lot over the years about the Chinese Party-state’s imposition of internet controls, so it was a refreshing change to…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 1, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The AI race is being waged with the top 1% of the 1% of talent in China; the rest of the 99.9% and the humanities majors have much less to look forward to. In the fourth and fifth-tier cities, one of most arresting problems in China…
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Bookshelf: Volga Blues
A current of tension runs throughout the chapters of Volga Blues: A Journey into the Heart of Russia. Sometimes it’s weak, and I forget that Italian journalist Marzio G. Mian and photographer Alessandro Cosmelli are traveling around Russia without authorization or the proper visas, posing instead as a historian and his friend. But then something…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 18, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews Recommendations China Stories The conviction of Lai, the self-made entrepreneur and pro-democracy media publisher, was in fact an anti-climax — a footnote in a long and carefully orchestrated exercise to silence one of the Party’s most stubborn and effective critics in the nominally autonomous special administrative…
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Bookshelf: Mission to Mao
The U.S. Army Air Force C-47 transport approached a dirt airstrip in North China, an informal ground crew guiding it in for landing while bystanders watched on a late July day in 1944. As the plane’s wheels touched down, all initially seemed well—until a loud boom sounded, the aircraft veering sharply to its left and…
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Weekly Wanderings: January 4, 2026
So … 2026. What a year, huh? 🤨 One good thing: I had the pleasure of serving as moderator for my friend Joseph Torigian at a discussion of his book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping, at Three Cats in Clawson, MI this afternoon. Three Cats is…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 